Rainforest must collect certain information about your merchant in order to underwrite and approve your merchant for payment processing.

Some of the information collected ensures Rainforest has the information legally-required for the "Know Your Customer" (KYC) or "Know Your Business" (KYB) processes to identify and verify the entity of your merchants in order to prevent financial crimes such as money laundering and terrorism financing. Other information is for underwriting or operational purposes, such as for populating the Payment Descriptor to your merchant's users.

Application Requirements

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Data collected during the onboarding process can vary slightly by organization type. Some examples include:

• An Individual merchant only provides their Social Security Number and does not have a Tax ID
• An LLC merchant can have up to 4 owners, but a Public Corporation merchant only provides a single Representative
• A Government merchant does not need to provide a Social Security Number for their Representative

The following table explains all data that must be set in order to submit the merchant application for approval.

• ✅: required field
• ❌: field cannot be set
• ✚: optional field

Owner/Representative data

The organization type determines the owner requirements:

• LLC, LLP, and Partnership organizations can have up to 4 owners with greater than 25% ownership.
• Private Corporation, Public Corporation, Non-Profit Organization, and Government organizations require 1 representative.
• Individual organizations only have 1 owner with 100% ownership.

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All beneficial owners of a merchant need to be verified

The U.S. government defines a beneficial owner as any individual (1) who directly or indirectly owns or controls 25% or more of the company, and (2) who directly or indirectly exercises “substantial control” over the reporting company.

See the beneficial owner requirements guide for additional information.

Payment descriptor

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The merchant's payment descriptor is how the payment appears on the users credit card or bank statement when they process a payment. This descriptor helps the user identify the payment. Additional information that the user can see (e.g. city of the merchant, phone number) depends on both the card brand (i.e. Visa, Mastercard, etc.) as well as the issuing bank (e.g. Chase, Citi, etc.).

The merchant's DBA (Doing Business As) name is used to determine the merchant's payment descriptor and follows the syntax of RF *[Merchant DBA name].

All merchants who process with Rainforest have a payment descriptor with the prefix "RF *". This descriptor is required as Rainforest's Payment Facilitator prefix.

Merchant descriptors are limited to 20 characters, including spaces and Rainforest's prefix (RF *).

For example, a merchant with the DBA name "Canopy Zip Lines" would have a payment descriptor of "RF *CANOPY ZIP LINES".